


The world had less colour without you

by EstellaB



Category: Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Genre: Everyone survives WWII implausibly, F/M, Gen, Some of them are cheesy, This is just the John and Nancy ones, Transferring all my old oneshots from Tumblr, some of them are sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:14:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25385128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EstellaB/pseuds/EstellaB
Summary: Various oneshots, sometimes taking advantages of e.g. the soulmate meme or the poetry meme, in which I speculate wildly about John and Nancy's relationship and try - not always successfully - to give them a happy ending.
Relationships: Dick Callum/Titty Walker, Nancy Blackett/John Walker
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> These oneshots, drabbles etc were originally posted on my Tumblr account ravenpuffheadcanons, which I no longer use because Tumblr ended up becoming a pretty stressful place to be. I still like some of these bits of writing, though, and I wanted to give them a new home. Maybe I'll even get around to writing some new ones one of these days!

John Walker is not a fool. He knows that he is an exceptionally ordinary man, who, by some trick of fate, is being loved by an extraordinary woman. Perhaps people raise their eyebrows, but Nancy has been his best friend since he was 12. He knows better than to let it bother him. He just enjoys it, and he tries to deserve it.

–

No-one has ever told Nancy that there are different rules about how men and women are meant to show affection—or if they did, she wasn’t listening—or if she was, she doesn’t care. Nancy goes off on long, rambling walks, and comes back sunburnt and grinning, hands full of wildflowers to give to her husband. She covers his face and hands in kisses and compliments. She writes dozens of letters when he is away—with a frankness that makes him blush, she talks about how much she longs to share a bed with him again. Nancy throws herself into being in love with the kind of intensity with which she does, well, everything.

–

After the war, John accepts an almost-civilian desk job in Portsmouth. Nancy protests, but half-heartedly, and he remembers long stretches of his childhood when he would hardly have recognised his father’s face. (He does not bring this up with Nancy, but he knows she is thinking about it too. He knows it was far worse for her).

–

She is not the easiest person in the world to live with. Nancy never lacked for occupation in the war, but afterwards, in the desperate scramble for normality, women get shoved aside again. Nancy’s enthusiasm gets squashed and malformed; it starts coming out sideways. Sometimes he wakes in the early hours to find her in the garden in her nightie–axe in hand, furiously chopping firewood. Once he gets up at dawn, and finds that she’s been vigorously pruning the apple tree for four hours. She cooks every recipe in an old book of Peggy’s over a two-week period. None of it is edible. John finds her crying in the kitchen when he gets in from work. She cannot explain why.

–

Nancy leaves, once. She walks out of the house, gets as far as slipping her ring off and putting it in her pocket. But by the time she reaches the end of the lane, she is crying again—and now she knows exactly why; she cannot bear never to hear John’s laugh again; the world is spinning and going dark just thinking of it. Nancy puts her ring back on. When she gets home, she switches on the wireless and waits for her husband to come home.

–

Once she finally talks to him, she feels relieved. John sits in silence for a while, and then gets up to make her a cup of tea. _I’ll take next week off_ , he says; _by the time I go back, you’ll have a job_. He is as good as his word—better. Between them, they write to everyone they know. Nancy is offered a column in Canal Boating Times; she’s offered a job teaching brats to sail twice a week; the local ferry company beg her to work there as often as she can. She accepts every offer, no matter how unsuitable, and they hire a cook with the extra income. Nancy is immediately overworked, and eventually happy. She starts going for long walks again. She starts picking flowers.


	2. There was a star danced

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I have a secret love for the silly Soulmate AUs that float around, and I love John and Nancy, and I couldn’t help it. (I also wanted to write Awkward Nancy, which I never ever get to do, because Nancy always seems so very self-possessed).

Nancy looked on, uncharacteristically quiet, as John sat at Beckfoot kitchen table surrounded by charts. Her gaze rested on his hands—sharpening a pencil with his penknife; making small, meticulous marks on the chart; taking a mouthful of tea. She read the words marked on his left hand, watched as the letters changed shape with his movements, though they had spelled out the same words since she first met him.

This was what Nancy did not like about this soulmate business. (There were plenty of things that Nancy did not like about this soulmate business, but some loomed larger than others). Ever since she’d met him, she’d known what those words said—it seemed so unfair, for someone as private as John, that something as personal as that moment—would be written where everyone could see it—before he’d even had the chance to experience it himself. Before John could even make his mind up whether it was what he actually wanted, the universe had decided for him, and published it on his skin for all to see—the moment when a friendship would turn in to something more, or perhaps when a stranger would catch his eye—and everyone would know before he had ever had a choice.

With irritation, she thought of the words splashed across her own shoulder blades—mercifully concealed from view, but still there, haunting her—demanding that one day she throw her own dreams and hopes away for a man she hadn’t even met yet. One day someone would stumble into saying them, accidentally declare himself her destiny, and then every ambition she’d had would wither away.

John glanced up then. He turned pink as he found himself the subject of intense focus, but he met her eyes anyway. “Nancy?”

Briefly, Nancy was embarrassed to have been caught staring—she had been studying John’s hands privately for years, unable to explain away her fascination, but she’d normally hidden it better—but she laughed it off anyway, and sat down next to him, ignoring the bump of her elbow against his, fiercely not noticing the sound of his breathing. Determinedly, Nancy switched her attention to their next adventure, watched as John sketched out a potential route with his fingers, made a few alterations quite sensibly. They finalised their plans, realised the sun had gone down without them even noticing it. John stood up to switch on the lamp, rolled up a sleeve that had come unbuttoned.

Nancy looked hastily at the table.

The whole house was quiet, and Nancy knew that it was after ten and that she should probably ask John to head off to the room he was sharing with Roger. Instead, she found herself looking back over their plans, wondering if there was any concern she could raise, anything to keep him sitting at her side for a few minutes longer—and then rolling her eyes, because she didn’t believe in any of this anyway, and she had places to go and plans forever and things to do.

“Nancy?”

She glanced up, and found John looking at her, puzzled, and she blushed and wished she hadn’t. Instinctively, helplessly, she smiled anyway, as did he, and she began busily clearing away notebooks and pencil shavings.

“Nancy… look, I’ll do that. I made the mess.” He sat back down next to her, and, irrationally, her feeling of loss or uncertainty or whatever it was faded away. Or, rather, the feeling had been irrational in the first place, and everything was fine again. Nancy folded up an itinerary with John’s careful notes on it. He placed a hand on her arm, briefly, and her breath didn’t hitch and she carried on doing what she was doing. “Tea’s cold. I’ll put the kettle on.”

She didn’t need the shock across her shoulders to tell her. Dozens of people must have said those words to her in her life—but this time it was John saying it, which was a complication she had never anticipated. Nancy was suddenly plunged into confusion and panic and something else that she couldn’t identify at all—she had been happy to lose a soulmate if it meant she could be free, but she had never anticipated losing _John_. She had never even believed in soulmates—but she believed passionately, violently, in John, and in their charts all over the table, and in his small neat handwriting. Nancy thought she might be sick, or shout, or wake everyone in the world and tell them—

And then, suddenly, something crystallised in her mind. The thing she was feeling was happiness—euphoria, giddiness—and certainty, and decision; she almost laughed, and John looked up for a split second—and then he laughed, and he put the kettle on and made tea quite normally, as if everything was still the same as it had been. Nancy glanced from John’s hands to his half-smile, and then back. The words were what they’d always been, they had been carved inside her for all her life perhaps, and she had no need to refresh her memory—but she could ignore them, if she wanted. She knew she could let the moment pass, and they would both be all right. They could carry on with what they were doing, and some day some other girl would sit with John and make him laugh, and Nancy would still be a pirate captain—but the words didn’t matter half as much as the hands they were on, and really she had made the choice years ago. When she spoke, her voice was clear and steady, and the world was dancing.

–

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (There is an alternative version of this story where Shiver my timbers appears on John’s chest at around age 14, and he swims with a shirt on for seven years afterwards because _everyone will know Roger if you tell anyone I’ll kill you_ ).


	3. Poetry and pugilism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A small headcanon about Nancy Blackett learning to box.

John teaches Nancy to box, aged eighteen, on leave from naval college. It’s a particularly murky, muddy November, and even Nancy does not want to go out searching for adventure. They tack together elderly cushions and overstuffed pillows and anything else they can press into service as padding and punchbags. Once they’ve cobbled together some makeshift protection, she punches hard enough to wind him. He tries to return the favour, though hitting Nancy–whatever the circumstances–leaves him feeling queasy. Her shout of delight, the first time she knocks him down in a fair fight, is more than worth it.

(Molly Blackett resolutely does not look out of the window as this is going on. She absolutely does not see her mud-spattered daughter in the garden, sparring with a off-duty naval cadet. Molly Blackett closes her eyes and stops her ears, and devoutly hopes that Peggy’s path to adulthood does not involve pugilism).

It doesn’t take that long for the two of them to be pretty evenly matched. John will always be stronger and heavier, but Nancy is quick and fierce and extremely determined. He misses the lessons even before they are over. For a wild moment, he wonders if he could teach her to wrestle next. As he thinks that, though, she catches his eye and grins at him–flushed and mussed and breathless; long legs in old shorts–he abruptly reconsiders, and turns away.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written in response to a prompt from Elennare on Tumblr (thank you!) for a story with the first line: "Come on, give me one good reason not to jump in the lake."

“Come on, give me one good reason not to jump in the lake.”

“It’s November,” John replied cautiously, “and it’s dark, and I don’t think the baby would enjoy it as much as we would.”

Nancy made a terse, irritated noise in the back of her throat, and heaved herself to her feet, slapping his hands away as he tried to help. “Let’s go for a hike, then.” She began to pace, perilously close to the beck. John fought to urge to intervene. “Or a bike ride. It’s not that far to Keele. Or—“ She bit her lip, and suddenly paused. “You think I’m mad.”

John chose his words very carefully. “I’m… curious. About what brought this on.” He looked at his wife, who looked pale and drawn and thoroughly miserable. “I thought you were exhausted.”

“I am exhausted!” Nancy snapped. She began striding to and fro again, more vigorously than before. “I am exhausted—that’s the point! I’ve been exhausted for months, and I’ve thrown up more mornings than not since March, and did you know how hot it is, being pregnant? It’s November and I’m still crawling out of my skin.” She kicked violently at a tuft of grass. “And soon I’ll have a tiny person to look after, and I’ll be even more exhausted, and sore too for ages, and really I’ll never be able to do anything ever—I haven’t really been Nancy for months, and now I have to be Ruth forever until I rot.” Catching sight of John’s face, she felt very slightly guilty. “Oh, I’m sorry love.” She rubbed her bump. “And I’m sorry, baby. I’m looking forward to the baby—I am—I just—“

To John’s intense relief, she stood still and took a very deep breath. When she spoke again, she sounded very slightly less wild. “I am looking forward to meeting you, baby.” She gave her tummy another affectionate pat, and sat down with a sigh. John perched next to her on the blanket, and slipped an arm around her waist. “I just wasn’t expecting a baby so soon.” Nancy turned to look at him. “Would you still want him, John? If it meant you could never go to sea again, if it meant you could never work, and you’d have to darn, and change nappies ten times a day, and never have any more adventures?”

John had no idea how to respond to that. He knew he would be away when the baby was born, and could make no promises to help. Nancy curled up next to him, head on his shoulder, and he had a horrible feeling that she was crying. He pressed a helpless, apologetic kiss into her hair. Goodness knows how long they sat there, and he was starting to think they should go indoors, when a thought occurred to him.

“Nancy.” He was still picking his words very carefully—he would a hundred times rather Nancy was angry than miserable. “You know that I’m going to rely on you to have adventures with the baby, as soon as she’s old enough?” He contorted himself until he was talking mostly to her bump. “I am definitely not brave enough to take you climbing and camping and sailing by myself, baby. I am going to age twenty years and become thoroughly dull the minute you’re born, but your mum is much braver than me. She can take you night swimming, and scale mountainsides with you before you’re hardly weaned, and one day I’m going to come back and find you both out by a fire somewhere causing havoc, covered in warpaint.”

Nancy laughed, albeit rather wetly. “You’re still absolutely sure she’s a girl.”

“She’s going to have your smile. We have an agreement, don’t we, baby?” He felt an energetic kick under his hand. “You see?” Nancy slipped her hand under his. “And whenever I’m here, I promise to look after her for a couple of nights, so that you can go and have adventures by yourself or with Peggy if you want. I’ll look after Peggy’s babies too if she has them. And she won’t be little forever, Nancy—we will find a way for you to work, as soon as you can, if you want. You don’t have to be the best of all natives, you just have to be you—that’s going to be best for everyone, honestly–just be Nancy who I love. And if it comes to it, the minute this business in Europe blows over, I’ll get myself moved to a desk job and I’ll help, I promise.”

“You’d hate that.”

“I don’t know. It sounds like all the excitement will be over here, before long, if she’s going to be just like you.”

Nancy poked him in the side. “He’s going to be a boy, and before he can even speak, he will have learnt to look at me with those _what ridiculous thing are you doing now_ eyes—just like his daddy.”

“That look is overwhelming admiration with only the tiniest bit of concern, Nancy.”

She turned and grinned at him, and she was as wonderful as ever, even with tears still streaked down both cheeks. “Your life would be terribly boring without me, you know.”

“Oh, believe me, I know.”

She kissed him then, and he helped her up. “It’s just the next new adventure,” Nancy declared, and the baby kicked again in cheerful agreement. “Shiver my timbers, what fun we’re going to have!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No consistency within my own world, I know. I've never even been sure if John and Nancy had kids, but if Nancy had fallen pregnant during the war I am 1000% sure she would have felt like this.


End file.
